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John Murphy writes for GodSpy on film, literature, and art. He works as the in-house illustrator and designer for Idylls Press, based in Ashland, Oregon. He recently graduated magna cum laude from the…[View entire profile]

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RE: Radiohead: Together in the Alone
Thanks for the kind words, Paul! It was fun writing the piece if only because it gave me the chance to revisit the Radiohead catalogue. I wasn't aware Yorke had borrowed from Dante, but the source doesn't surprise me. (Do you remember the passage, by any chance?) I vaguely recall Yorke citing the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an influence on…

RE: What the Presidential Election Reveals About the American Soul
I've come to the party a tad late here, but just wanted to add my two bits. A friend of mine (now a priest) cited Albacete as one of the primary forces behind his conversion. Referring to Albacete, he told me that "to deny Christ would be to deny this man." In some ways that's the logical extension of Hertzberg's comment that he didn't believe…

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Reviews > Movies

Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest was a novel about Hitler narrated by a demon, who writes: “Most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil…There need be no surprise, then, that the world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality.” I was… READ MORE >

Reviews > Movies

When Caden Cotard wakes up, the first thing he does is look in a mirror. He sees a pudgy, middle-aged, balding, sad-sack of a human being. The rest of the movie will be like that: a merciless self-examination. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi and fantasy author, described most current literary fiction as “miserable people having small epiphanies of misery.”… READ MORE >

Reviews > Books

A legendary manuscript co-written by Beat Masters, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, has finally come to light as And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Written when both were unknown and unpublished, leading hardscrabble lives in wartime New York, the real-life story centers on the doomed relationship between Lucien Carr and… READ MORE >

Reviews > Movies

Twilight begs the question, why do girls always go for vampires? Is it the Byronic good looks? Or perhaps because they’re given to lines like, “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,” and “You’re my own personal brand of heroin.” Bella, a junior in high school recently relocated from Arizona… READ MORE >

Reviews > Music

There’s a pseudo-myth in rock music that drug-abusing artists lose their edge when they clean up their act. Their music, once forged in the crucible of angst and addiction, is softened and sanitized by sobriety. It’s a popular theory, especially among would-be rock stars without a label contract but with a dealer contact. To paraphrase… READ MORE >

Reviews > Movies

Who or what is a RocknRolla? Someone born to be in a Guy Ritchie flick, that’s who. An amoral member of the criminal class doing bad things in stylish threads and an expensive pair of shades, spouting tough-lout talk like a Cockney at a Tarantino casting call. Ritchie’s first and best movies were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… READ MORE >

Reviews > Books

Chuck Klosterman acquits himself well with his first novel, Downtown Owl. He’s better known as a wiseass essayist on movies, video games, heavy-metal music and pop culture miscellany for publications like Esquire, Spin, and The Guardian. An ominous news clipping prefaces Downtown Owl, reporting on a vicious blizzard that claimed the… READ MORE >

Reviews > Music

If, in his early days, middle-class Minnesotan Bob Zimmerman playacted the persona of hobo troubador Bob Dylan, he has since evolved into the genuine article, an authentic Elder Statesman of American music. Dylan’s late-career flowering, which began with 1997’s death-haunted, Time Out of Mind (though 1989’s Oh Mercy had its… READ MORE >

Reviews > Movies

No one could accuse Oliver Stone of ducking controversy. But I don’t think anyone expected his new movie about the George Bush presidency, W., to be predictable and toothless, if intermittently amusing. In the era of the internet and insider confessionals, most of what appears on screen has already been widely circulated. What, Bush… READ MORE >

Reviews > Movies

A movie mocking Hollywood liberals is overdue, but a movie mocking Michael Moore is outdated. David Zucker, director of zany comedies like Airplane and Naked Gun, sets his satirical sights on a ripe target: the self-satisfaction of bleeding-heart Hollywood liberals (the kind who decry world poverty while collecting multi-million dollar paychecks).… READ MORE >